SAFECITY- A unique mapping platform

SAFECITY- A unique mapping platform

“UN Women states that 1 in 3 women face some kind of sexual assault at least once in their lifetime. But in our experience, the statistic in India seems to be extremely high. A rape occurs every 20 mins in India.Yet most women and girls do not talk about this abuse for a multiple of reasons – fear of society, culture, victim blaming, fear of police, tedious formal procedures etc. As a result women keep silent and this data is not captured anywhere but the perpetrator gets bolder over time and we accept it as part of our daily routine. This leads to under communication and under reporting of the issue”speaks Elsa D’Silva,founder of SafeCity when asked about the role of this mapping site.

SAFECITY is a a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces and the data which is anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to identify factors that causes behaviour that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions.Since its launch on 26 Dec 2012 it has collected close to 10,000 stories from over 50 cities in India, Kenya, Cameroon and Nepal.

It is known that women aren’t safe when they are moving, traveling, commuting or sometimes even near their own houses due to various factors of harassment. There hasn’t been any such kind of initiative in India which led to an united platform to act against this kind of behaviour.